Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead by Tom Stoppard

22:44Jeff:But it's just so fun to hang out with them. What a pleasure for a couple of hours. Yeah. Stuppert himself has a fascinating backstory. Born in Czechoslovakia in 1937, his family fled during the incoming Nazi evasion. His father was a doctor who worked for some sort of manufacturer, and that manufacturer sought what was coming and transferred their family, knowing they're non-practicing Jews, but as everyone knows, the Nazis didn't care about that, and transferred them out to Singapore. So it got them out of the way, sort of a mini Schindler's List kind of moment. Then his siblings and his mother moved to England.

23:21His father stayed behind to be a doctor and perished there. And then, so his original name was not Stoppard. It's Strassler, I believe. I don't have the note right in front of me. His mother remarried to someone named Kenna Stoppard, and he took his name, went to English boarding school. But notably, English is Tom Stoppard's second language, which is sort of Nabokovian mind-blowing. I'm in awe of people who do this who start from English, but people who switch over and then do this is even a trick on top of a trick. Take that, anti-Stratfordians. I have the note here. He ended his formal education at 17 to become a reporter.

23:58and one of the critiques of, not critiques, one of the anti-Stratfordians, let me say what that is, is the people that think Shakespeare wasn't Shakespeare, that it must have been Francis Bacon or someone who went to Oxbridge and had a more traditional classical education, because you couldn't have written these plays if you didn't. And Stoppard shows us that you don't have to do that, because I'm going to say this a little bit later, if you can get away from the Shakespeare of all the Shakespeare, Stoppard's operating at the same level. The wordplay, it just is operating at the same level. And he did it not on his own.

24:34He was a part of groups and had mentorships and all kinds of things. But he did not need to go to study at King's College for four years and get ones and whatever and go on. He was a voracious reader and took in a bunch of culture and did something with it and then operates at the highest level from that. I think it's interesting he was a drama critic, then wrote radio plays. There was a lot of writing and thinking that happened before this time. Just feeding tons of material into his brain. And he did a bunch of translations, which I think is really interesting, adaptations of a lot. Like he was playing around with theater as he was thinking about making original theater of his own.

25:15And so it's interesting to think of like he's in an adaptive mode here of taking things in and spitting something else interesting out. So that really gets him going and then, you know, has an illustrious career, becomes Sir Tom Stoppard in 1997. Hell of a look. I'm not the only person, obviously, to compare him to Shakespeare, George Bernard Shaw, which we should do someday. I think Shaw is an interesting antecedent. There's a lot of wordplay and wit that goes on at the same time. Yeah, I think. What else? What else to say? Hey, considered a candidate for the Nobel Prize for literature, public appeals for it.

25:48Maybe we'll talk a little bit. You have a note here about why not. I think that's an interesting conversation. And then Rebecca has a Hollywood career, which is, I don't know, would you take the over or under about his Hollywood career? What would you, it's kind of fascinating to think of because really only Shakespeare in Love, to my mind, has any glimmer of what we see in Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, but Hollywood is a different animal.

26:10Jeff:The Hollywood is a different animal. He wrote the screenplay for Shakespeare in Love. It did win Best Original Screenplay and Best Picture at the Oscars that year. A pretty controversial Best Picture win because that's the Saving Private Ryan year. And then he also wrote the screenplay for the 2014 adaptation of Anna Karenina starring Keira Knightley. A lot of mixed reviews of that one. But you can look on his Wikipedia page and other online information. He did like script polishing and cleanups, punch up writing for people like Spielberg, who said that Stoppard wrote virtually every line of the final versions of Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade and Empire of the Sun.

26:48Jeff:But he was uncredited. So take that to mean what you will. But he was out there. He was in the mix. He's clearly a great writer. He does have such an ear for dialogue and engaging characters and widely read, you know, among his translations for the stage were multiple translations of Chekhov works. He translated The Seagull and The Cherry Orchard. Like he can work in a lot of modes. And seeing that, we see that in his Hollywood work as well. Yeah. And just something on a big picture, he writes about ideas and people having ideas and people having ideas about ideas, which is catnip for me. It's all the drugs rolled into one for what I like to do.

27:29So lots of artists and intellectuals and academics. Yes, sir. Can I have some more, please? Rebecca, let's talk about our own experience with this particular play and maybe Stoppard in general.

27:41Jeff:This was my first time reading it. I saw it in high school. My high school's drama department put this on. I think it's a weird move. I don't remember. I was very confused because I didn't know Hamlet very well. And I didn't realize when I saw it that all of the things happening on screen were actually from Hamlet. Nobody was explaining that. I thought this is a really strange choice for this drama department to do this when most of the audience is not going to be familiar at all. So this was really my first true experience. I read it. And then I did my favorite thing to do when I'm reading a play, which is listen to a full cast audio production.

28:22Jeff:The one I listened to was fine, but it was very, it was produced in the very like Shakespearean tradition. There was a lot of, yeah, a lot of like high. You got to loose and be silly. You see my arms here. I guess on YouTube maybe. Yeah, it felt more like listening to classical Shakespeare than the banter of Stoppard. And so then when I watched the adaptation, which we'll talk about more later in the show, but I watched the adaptation starring Gary Oldman and Tim Roth. And that like looseness and play and banter that really brought it home for me. So that would be my advice is if you're encountering this for the first time or it's been a while, read it on the page.

28:58Jeff:But then to really get the more theatrical experience of it, I found the film to be a better version of that than an audio book was here. Yeah. My first time reading it was in college in a Shakespearean adaptation course, which was pretty fun. We have not talked about our office hours, but I think we should do our favorite Shakespeare adaptations for our office hours. That sounds great. We can talk about them. So I won't spoil the things I might mention there. I have never seen it live. I would love to see it live. I did watch the Roth Oldman version in a very early Netflix DVD rental experience when I was living in New York.

29:32Remember the days where you get the DVDs? In the mail. One of our few splurges when we were really broke in the early days was a three DVDs at a time Netflix subscription.

29:43Jeff:We did the same thing. Which was amazing, which was tremendously great because you could get nearly anything. We had a really good Blockbuster and Carol Garns in Brooklyn, but they didn't have everything. And it was a really good chance to get stuff that I was just interested in. I had more time than money. And so a Netflix subscription really did us well. And I caught up on a lot of things I've been wanting to see. I have this down in miscellaneous, but this is the only, Stoppard directed the adaptation. It's the only one he did direct. I think it's good. I mean, I don't know what your take on.

30:13I think it's pretty fun.

30:14Jeff:Yeah, I really enjoyed it. I checked Rotten Tomatoes and it has like a 61 % on Rotten Tomatoes, but an 80 % popcorn rating. So I think viewers enjoyed it more than critics did, which is fine with me. I had a good time. Yeah, I don't care. So yeah, this, and then Stoppard, I guess that my real Stoppard conversion was when I saw the Invention of Love in London when I was in college traveling. And that blew me away. And then I saw it again when I moved. I sort of followed Invention of Love from visiting in London. Then I moved to New York and it was playing. It played only for three months in New York in the spring of 2001.

30:53And that was my first. No, that was my second year in New York. And I went to see that. And Robert Sean Leonard played the lead. He was tremendous. John Hurt played the lead in the English. Well, Robert Sean A.E. Houseman, who is an English sort of poet, pastoral poet. There's an old and young version. So I saw someone that I knew is amazing, that long collaborator with Stoppard in London, and then a young Robert Sean Leonard, who I believe won the Tony, if I remember right. I didn't write this down. I believe he won a Tony for Best Actor in that play.

31:28Jeff:Robert Sean Leonard, of course, the star of Dead Poets Society. Right. Which also has Shakespeare in it. Alongside my boyfriend, Ethan Hawke. And Odyssey, because they read Ulysses by Alfred Lord Tennyson. That's right. So, okay. So there we go. What is it like to read this? What's it all about? Why don't you start off? We both have added some things, but why don't you take the first couple bites at this particular apple? I found the conceit of imagining what's happening offstage in one of the most famous stories in English literature to just be really fun and that it opens up so many possibilities precisely because Rosencrantz and Guildenstern get so little screen time or stage time in the Shakespeare.

32:08Jeff:They could be up to anything when they're not around. And that Stopper did this with them of like, what is it like when they're just farting around waiting for Hamlet to show up and figure out, try to figure out why he's so depressed? I found the silly, absurd vibe to feel like a sustained version of that bit from the Royal Tenenbaums where Owen Wilson is describing his book as, well, everyone knows Custer died at Little Bighorn. What this book presupposes is maybe he didn't. Just that. Let's just play with this for a while. The characters are so dumb that they sound kind of smart. And we all know that type of person.

32:46Jeff:But also you have to be really smart in order to make characters that are this dumb but kind of smart work so well. And that really is the razzle dazzle of Stoppard's intellect just shining. And I like it that you can feel him trying, you know, like, sometimes we really love the works where it feels effortless. This is not a work where it feels effortless, but you can feel his effort in a way that's really, I think, fun and satisfying. On a practical level, what it feels like to read this is there's a lot of stage direction. And Stoppard has really specific ideas about what the characters should be doing.

33:25Jeff:And you do need to read those or you will be confused about what they're talking about. It's so funny, too, because, you know, the immediate connection to Shakespeare is all over the place for this. But famously, there's very little, if any, stage direction in the extant scripts for Shakespeare. And it makes you wonder what the actual direction was like. What notes was Billy Shakespeare's given to people to play this stuff? Because you're right. Stoppard can be very specific and almost elusive in the stage direction where it's like it's more of a, I don't know, almost a poetical kind of stage direction than a practical one, though there's very practical ones too.

34:05But in the, you know, my favorite scene, just from a everything happening at once where they're playing the question game back and forth and it's wonderfully staged in the film. I don't know if it was staged like that originally as like kind of a tennis match where they're volleying back and forth, but that's not in that tennis match stuff is not in the stage, the play. So even something as relatively copiously directed on the page here still has attendant layers that we don't have access to, which I find completely fascinating.

34:34Jeff:Yeah. And there are a lot of parentheticals about how lines are to be delivered. There's one that's like this character laughs and then is immediately like he's never laughed once in his life. He just turns on a dime. There will be a little parenthetical about this word is in a stunted manner or something like that. Stoppard really was envisioning what this would look like on the stage and how it would sound. In terms of like, what are the big ideas? It's about everything and nothing. What is the meaning of life? What might it be like to be dead? How does chance work? Chance and fate, all those same kinds of things that Shakespeare is playing with.

35:10Jeff:But Stoppard is just kind of juggling all the balls in the air. Bruce Weber, who wrote the obituary about Stoppard for The New York Times, described his sparkling braininess. And it's hard to do better than those two words for capturing Stoppard's whole vibe, I think. Yeah. I think there's a constellation of ideas that circle each other, but at the core of them is fate, free will, performance, and death, sort of in that role, where they've winked into existence and are trying to figure out what this thing is all about, both a play and their own role in it, which becomes a metaphor for our own role.

35:49And right, like Shakespeare, we're just players on a stage, right? This is a re-metaphorization of that. Players on the stage, they're us as well. So I think if done well as a reader and as a performance, we start to cross-identify with Rosencrantz and Gildner said their plight is not unlike ours. we wink into existence and we're doing the best we can and most of us have a lot less control over a destiny than we might think we all are going to die and what the hell are we going to do with that is here and you know but also it's about acting and identity and performance as well what the theater can and can't do about how we are creatures of language right how do they encounter each other.

36:34They encounter the players from Shakespeare in a really wonderful use of that. And I think you have a wonderful note I'll save for a little bit later about the players. But then they start acting together and you move inside and outside of plays of different kind. And Hamlet sort of looms as the center of everything. But we are and they are then just, you know, kind of orbiting that and what they do with that orbital gravity and how we come to understand and make peace of that or not, I think is the thing here. And I think we're told and learn and know that if we have any ammunition about the long dark of eternity, it's an art and language and community and being in relationship to each other.

37:15Jeff:Yeah, it's very meta in a way that I find to be really enlivening and exciting. There's a lot of banter for banter's sake. These characters just like bouncing words off of each other and playing with them. And even when one of them says something serious, the other might volley it back in jest. And then there's tension between the two of them over like, which direction is this moment of conversation going to take? Are we going to play the game? Or are we going to do the philosophical thing? Or could we do them both at the same time? If you like sparkling braininess, it's just really hard to do better than how this all sounds when it's delivered well.

37:54All right. Time for straight thoughts, Rebecca. As you were reading this, watching it, listening to it, what occurred to you? What sort of, maybe not go on the front sheet of what this is about, but maybe on the B side or the deep cuts or the footnote?

38:06Jeff:I had so many stray thoughts for such a short work here. It made me think a lot about what Stoppard's version of The Princess Bride would have been like, especially that Iocane powder scene that's delivered as a really, it's written to sound like really intelligent and high-minded and I know, but he knows, but you know, but I know, but we both know. And how does it all work? And I think a stoppered version would just have been even more fun and silly and high-minded. I was wondering really if he though was too accessible because it is fun or maybe too dry for the Nobel. So the question is why no Nobel for TS?

38:41Why no Nobel?

38:42Jeff:Yeah. And like Like, often the works of people who win the Nobel are difficult in some way, or they're like really something that you have to work to understand. And I don't know that that's always the way I would go with it. Like the prompt for the Nobel, as we were just talking about on the vegetarian episode, is someone who has moved literature in an ideal direction. And you can really make a case that Stoppard does that here. You're elevating Shakespeare, but you're making Shakespeare more accessible at the same time. His work is fun. It's accessible. I just wondered, you know, like we'll never know.

39:20Jeff:But I just wondered if it's. Yeah, I don't have a good. I don't have a good excuse for the Academy. I think it certainly would have been warranted prior to Dylan winning. I would have said things like he was so mainstream. but Dylan's even more mainstream than Stoppard ever was so these committees change over time so maybe the personality of the committee over the last 20 years though Stoppard you know has been a lot I don't I don't have a good answer it does there's no reason and I think he's one of those figures that even as popular as he is the work is demanding like it you Toppard exceeds me I have to I'm running to keep up with Stoppard in reading and experiencing and thinking about it.

40:08So I don't have a good reason. I think it would have been wonderful. I don't think it would have mattered to his career. So in a way, the discovery from around the world element that the Nobel can provide made it be wasted. But you could say the same thing about Bob Dylan. So I don't have a good answer, Rebecca. I really don't.

40:25Jeff:I think mostly in the history of the Nobel, the prize for literature tends to go to novelists and poets. It's just unusual for a playwright to win it. And So Occam's razor would be they're just not looking as hard at the playwrights, which is unfortunate. There's a lot of really wonderful drama that does move literature in an ideal direction. And there are way more deserving writers than you can capture in an award that's given once a year. That's probably the answer. That's probably the answer. All the writers in the whole world. But I just, you know, I was wondering about it on a more casual, stray thoughts level.

40:57Jeff:Is the Gary standalone episode of The Bear a play on Rosencrantz and Guildenstern? It's two guys who are buds who get sent off on a mission from their boss for the day. And instead of doing the thing, they just play around. They drive around. They hang out in a bar. They get into some fights. Probably not an overt homage, but the vibe struck me. It's like those guys in that one episode, even Moss Bachrach and Jon Bernthal, are playing off of each other in a similar way. There's a lot of banter. There's a lot of silliness. And then all of a sudden, we're in a deep moment. Or maybe it's just that a lot of modern writers owe a debt, whether they know it or not, to Stoppard.

41:35Jeff:But having seen that recently, I wondered. Yeah, maybe, but I think it's probably going back one step to waiting for Godot, like a two-hander of people hanging out and making something out of the hang. And maybe there are literary antecedents even to that. But Godot is – there's Shakespeare and Godot that feed into Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are dead in a lot of different ways. But I think it's interesting to look at how they're different and what they're doing at the same level. I had this before. If you take away the aura of Shakespeare, if I can squint and see that Stoppard is finest, and I'm not sure that I would rank Rosencrantz and Guildenstern among his three.

42:14That's me. Invention of Love, Arcadia, Jumpers, the real thing. He's up there. Wherever that elevation is, he's spinning around on that high wire and doing those things. Like I said, he was born Strassler and English was a second language. and he later said that he tended to write characters for whom identity was slippery. So the slippage of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern into and who am I and am I part of this play? I think there's an interesting thing to be said. It's like to be enough of an outsider for an artist is fascinating to see. I also wonder about, I didn't find any reading about his decision not to attend higher education.

42:58Oh, yeah, college. But I can't help wonder if maybe he felt like an outsider, wanted to remain outside. I just am fascinated by that idea. And Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, one of the things about it is being peripheral, right? And how do you become in and out of the main and what does that do to your sense of identity? And how do you use that as a sort of a shield rather than a, you know, use it as a weapon rather than be subject to what I find fascinating.

43:30Jeff:I really love the like multiple levels that the identity slipperiness works on here where they like not only are they confused about their own identities, but they can't keep straight between them. Who's who? It's like I'm Rosencrantz and he's Guildenstern. Wait, no, I'm Guildenstern and he's Rosencrantz. And they mix it up between each other, but then everybody around them sort of mixes it up as well. And it's been a while since I reread Waiting for Godot. I was sort of wishing this morning that I had made time for that in the work, in the pre-work here. But that there, I think that identity slipperiness between each other and that it's two characters who really, you can read as almost one.

44:07Like, it's more interesting to watch these two bounce off of each other, but they're not very differentiated, really at all.

44:14Jeff:Like we don't have separate personality traits for these two guys. They're kind of the same person talking out of two faces and watching that happen, especially as performed by Gary Oldman and Tim Roth. I have to tell you, just a great time. Yeah, and that waiting for Godot, like, at the time and now, it was an obvious sort of, okay, it's in the shadow of waiting for Godot even more than anything else, maybe even more than Shakespeare in terms of the structure of the play. If you don't know that, that's Beckett. I think it's 1948, 1949. I don't quite remember. But it's two characters, and they're waiting for Godot to arrive.

44:51and they have not dissimilar kinds of interactions and musing and silliness and pondering their own fate. And then what, and Godot never arrives, spoiler alert for Waiting for Godot, Godot never arrives. And much like Stoppard's refusal to accept or deny any reading, that's the same thing that happened for Beckett in Waiting for Godot. And then that itself becomes a source of continued interest, right, in how many high school or college English courses were what you think Godot is. And it could be Freudian, it could be sexual, it could be Christian, it could be philosophical. But if you think of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern as a sort of waiting for Godot, we have our Godot in the form of Hamlet, right?

45:38And so then what does Hamlet represent? You know, one of my English teachers was like, I actually don't think it's that complicated with waiting for Godot. God is in the name Godot. Like, this is about existential. And we have this idea of God who never shows up. And it's just us figuring out like, yeah, okay. I, as you know, I like to hold multiple interpretations. So I'm never going to plant my flag on one when I get multiple flags to plant. But that one is. And if you think, okay, so if Hamlet is replacing this figure of an absent God for Stoppard, what is that about? Well, I think that's what we do instead of spirituality is art and language.

46:12That is what we do instead. And story. And so that we think

46:16Jeff:spoiler alert for is this about art and writing? Yeah, it really but like that their, their existence happens as given meaning because of a relationship to this artistic figure. Because outside of that, it's just a black void of the theater. And then by extension, the black void of the universe, but we wink into existence and we talk to each other. Ergo, that's it. Yeah. And they get an avenue into a lot of those conversations by way of the players, this troop of dramatists that show up who are being in Hamlet. Hamlet asks them to perform a play. And that's where he's written in the extra scene that will depict his uncle killing his father in order to marry his mother and steal the crown and do all the things.

47:00Jeff:and this time around we get to hang out with the players as well another example of stoppard pulling in characters from the side and putting them center stage where like their main thing is deaths they can do all sorts of plays but all of them have deaths they wear the same costumes for most of their plays and so they often get confused about which one they're performing because they're the costumes all look the same but once they get to the death part the players are okay just like that those moments go from so silly into now let us consider death in a serious way and then you're back out of it flipping coins again kind of before you've had time to wrap your head around that we're considering death like the movement is really quick and so when you were talking about feeling like stoppard is beyond you i think that's part of the experience of reading this is that it moves quickly and that the idea has just slipped away right as you felt like you were starting to get your arms around it.

47:56I think that's right. Yeah, if you do the how many layers of artifice are we at here, I was trying to watch for it. I think the Satan's crotch of the inferno of meta-theatricality here is when these players have performed something for Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, but then Rosencrantz and Guildenstern have slipped away, and then the players are telling about them. So in that moment, we are having actors tell Rosencrantz and Guildenstern about another play that's within a play that's about another play within another play. Like that is that is heady stuff. It's a lot. It is real nesting dolls to do at the same time.

48:40All right. From there. Let's see. Let's go to notable quotes. We didn't. This is not very long. This is a, is it even an 80 minute movie? I don't even know the runtime. Oh, the movie is like right at two hours.

48:53Jeff:Oh, right at two hours. Okay. Yeah. I read it in one sitting a couple of days ago because I just wanted to do all at once. Me too. I think some of the, especially theater or reading screenplays or scripts is try to mimic what the experience would be like where you don't get up and read it over three days. I think that's part of the same time. All right, Rebecca, what quote should we bring into the chat here? This was a hard game also. It's a very hard game. I feel like quoting Stoppard is a real exercise in you had to be there. You kind of have to be immersed in it. But they're talking to each other early in the play about what's going on and what happened earlier that day.

49:32Jeff:Do you remember? How did we even what are we doing here? And one says to the other, then a messenger arrived. We had been sent for. Nothing else happened. And that's kind of also a log line for the whole play. But then some of the more playful things, the colors red, blue and green are real. The color yellow is a mystical experience shared by everybody. What? When they're talking to the head player, there are only two of us. Is that enough? For an audience, disappointing. For voyeurs, about average. and then you get into like all your life you live so close to truth it becomes a permanent blur in the corner of your eye and when something nudges it into outline it is like being ambushed by a grotesque and that that sits alongside red blue and green are real colors yellow is an illusion there was also a moment where gildenstern says do i contradict myself And that has to be a nod to Uncle Walt, right?

50:32You can't say that without nodding to Dub Dub. Yeah.

50:37Jeff:What a fine persecution to be kept intrigued without ever quite being enlightened. Also a good logline for the whole show. Indeed. I was waiting for you to delve. When is he going to start delving, I asked myself. And then my favorite, operating on two levels, are we? How clever. Yeah, it's really good. What about you? Today's episode is brought to you by the Death of an Artist podcast. In February 2024, celebrated children's book author and illustrator Petra Mathers and her husband, photographer Michael Mathers, mailed letters to dozens of friends and family members to let them know that they had died on their own terms in their own home before age could take that choice away from them.

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54:54I think in one of the, there's a couple of extended sequences where they're not just batting back and forth. And there's one in which, and it doesn't matter, it's Gildenstern or Rosencrantz, doing extended sort of the actual thinking about what it's like to be dead, right? And then later, I think it's later, whatever became of the moment when one first knew about death, there must have been one moment in childhood when it first occurred to you that you don't go on forever. It must have been shattering, stamped into one's memory, and yet I cannot remember it. It never occurred to me at all. What does one make of that?

55:25We must be born with an intuition of mortality before we know the word for it before we know that there are words out we come bloodied and squalling with the knowledge that for all the compasses in the world there's only one direction and time is its only measure and then you get funny stuff about death death followed by eternity the worst of both worlds what a terrible thought we are tied down to a language which makes up an obscurity what it lacks in style i could sit and think about that one for a while um this is the player i extract significance from melodrama a significance which is it does not fact contain but occasionally from out of this matter there escapes a thin beam of light that seen at the right angle can crack the shell of mortality that's art that's language that's creativity um let's let's act a little could you be rosencrantz and i'll be gildenstern we are not actors but just to make this more fun we'll do this little back and forth Do you want to be Rosencrantz and I'll be Guildenstern?

56:23Either one. We're both and neither. You start, though.

56:25Jeff:All right. We might as well be dead. Do you think death could possibly be a boat? No, no. Death is not. Death isn't. You take my meaning. Death is the ultimate negative. Not being. You can't not be on a boat. I've frequently not been on boats. No, no, no. What you've been is not on boats. That's just good shit. I don't know what to say. That's fun. That's me. That's not them. Yeah. The question game that they play is like impossible to describe. Just YouTube it. There's a great clip on YouTube. Just watch it. Oldman Roth question game stopper. You'll find it. Yeah. Yeah. Totally worth it. This is the one.

57:01This is the hammer for me that I've kept with me. I think about this quote from some time to time. We cross our bridges when we come to them and burn them behind us with nothing to show for our progress except a memory of the smell of smoke and a presumption that once our eyes watered. God.

57:16Jeff:Woo hoo hoo. Tom Stopper, 29 years old. Yeah. All right. Let's do one more back and forth. I'll start this time. I'll start this time. Okay. I think I have it. A man talking sense to himself is no matter than a man talking nonsense not to himself. Or just as mad. Or just as mad. And he does both. And so there you are. Stark Raving Sane. Stark Raving Sane, which was the other choice for my name of my book blog back in the day. It was ultimately reading eight, but I almost picked Stark Raving Sane. Really? same time. That's one for you, Rebecca. No one else cares about you. I love that. It's a good nugget.

57:51Jeff:A little more drop from O 'Neill here. I think I say Stark Raving Sane. I steal that and I don't attribute it. I don't use it in writing, but in my language, I use that idea of Stark Raving Sane. All right, Rebecca. Is it for you? How is it, you know, if it's for you or not for you? I mean, if you're into Shakespeare, wordplay, absurdism, you do kind of have to be into Shakespeare, I think, for this to work. I'm so sorry to tell you. You could have some sense of it. Yeah. I mean, you know. Do you think just like how much, I guess, is the question do you need to know? I think, I feel like. Need being the operative.

58:25Jeff:If you don't want to read it, then go watch a Hamlet adaptation. Yeah, right. Even the early, is it 2000 Hamlet with Ethan Hawke and Juliette Stiles? Like that'll get you the vibe. But it helps to know like what's going on around these guys while they're just hanging out. But you could have such a good weekend, though, like reading Hamlet on Saturday and Rosencrantz and Guildenstern the next day. Just do them back to back and have a good time. I also think this is for you. Like, this is maybe too generous to take a Watiti. But if you like that vibe. Wow. Okay. But like an elevation of that vibe.

59:02Jeff:Watiti is trying to be in the mode of Stoppard, I think. Yeah, I think what you are actually in on is, this is down to my hot take, maybe I'll bridge the gap here. Let's do it. What a terrible look for movies reading this is. Yeah.

59:25Yes. You know, because even Shakespeare in Love, which is a stopper play, is not really operating on the same intellectual, creative atmosphere. It just can't do it because of commercial reasons, I think. I think it's just because of that.

59:44Jeff:I re-watched it when he died last year, and it's great, but it is not the same level as this. Yes. Yeah. Not for you if you need things to happen and for those things to always mean something. But also sometimes they do mean something. I mean, I'm not going to push back, but I think it's really deeper than most things that are about something. I agree. I think that's the magic trick is that he's taking a non-entity and non-characters and spinning it into the highest sort of levels of thinking about life, death, the universe, and everything. but if you need profundity to be in the form of yes melodrama or conventional storytelling beats or you need characters to be constant or you know likable or any kinds of way like it just resists all of those things it is largely a creation of language for language shake but that's everything we do to make meaning out of anything in the literary arts so there's no It's not like, even in Hamlet, you get the straight to camera or like straight to audience to be or not to be.

1:00:48Jeff:You get those big moments and it's going to sneak up on you in Stoppard and you have to enjoy that it's going to sneak up on you. If you want it to be like the trumpets blare and here comes the moment of meaning, you're just not going to find that here. Right. Yeah. Stoppard relates in the, I don't know if it's an anniversary edition or just some edition I have, talks about hearing someone in one of the initial runs in the audience say, could they just get on with it already? And being sympathetic to that because it's weird. It's weird to start and it takes a while to get into the rhythm of it.

1:01:20Jeff:I'll tell that story now. I had it down in the trivia section coming a little bit later, but that is in the 50th anniversary edition. And it was the opening night of the show at the Old Vic in London. And he got so discouraged hearing that man around him being like, oh my God, I wish they'd get on with it. That at intermission, Stoppard and his wife left and went to the pub next door and they didn't go back to see the second half of the play. So when they left the pub afterwards, they were surprised and delighted to find that the actors were thrilled with how it had been received in the end. Amazing.

1:01:53Jeff:Amazing. Yeah. People who sat through the experience had the journey of, I wish they'd get onto it and then were captivated and totally in love with it, but that he missed the second half of the opening night performance because that was so disheartening is just a fun little story. And I think one thing that a modern or new reader to the play might take from that is it does build. Like there's a lot of faffing about to start, but it does start to accrue meeting and you start to have more and more relationship. And as their consciousness, if we think of them as being winked into existence, they do learn and grow to some degree over the time in their actions with other people and their sort of swap their forays back into the main of the Hamlet play that we get at the same time.

1:02:38All right, I think we're ready for the immortal questions that are asked. Which of these are primary here? Here are our candidates. And then I throw to Rebecca to pick out a couple that seem to be the tallest flowers in the garden for this one. What is the good life? What do I owe my neighbor and who is my neighbor? How do I know what I know. Is this all there is? How to deal with the certainty of death? What else might there be? What's to deal with good and evil? Free will, real or no? Who am I? Who are my people? And what is the nature of justice? So this isn't an everyone one. Like we get some of those, but it's a many.

1:03:16Where do you want to put a sticker, a highlight, a gold star?

1:03:20Jeff:How do I know what I know? Yeah. How to deal with the certainty of death? Absolutely. Who am I? I mean, like, literally, who am I? Yes, literally, who am I? And who are you? And am I not you? Are you not me? Are we the same? And does it go back and forth? And a little of the built into that, like, free will, real or no, like, they wrestle and tell some jokes about fate and chance. But there's not a lot about that, like, in the text there. It's mostly how do I know what I know? how to deal with the certainty of death. Who am I? Who are we? What are we doing here? Who are we? What are we doing here?

1:03:55Yeah. Yeah, free will, absolutely. How do I know? Yeah, I think those are the few. I think those are the case. When we look at them, like how central, right? How to deal with the certainty of death? How do I know what I know? And who am I? Those are like the core, right? The rest of the questions are built off that. But that's what I'm, I guess what I'm getting at here. This is really trying to wrestle with pillars of the earth kinds of questions. And it's fun. Oh, that's right. It's fun.

1:04:23Jeff:I just want to fly, you know, like put a banner behind a plane and fly around. Like you can ask these questions in art in ways that are really fun. Yeah, that's right. Are we sure this is fun? Hilarious. It's absolutely about art and writing. To quote Guildenstern, words, words. They're all we have to go on. Oh, you had my quote from above here. We are tied down to a language makes up in obscurity what it lacks in style. Amazing quote. Rebecca, I did not rewatch the movie. My memory of it is quite good. So I'll leave you to this. Could you get most of the gist from watching the Signal adaptation?

1:05:01In this case, it would be the one that's available, which is the Roth Oldman directed by Stoppard version.

1:05:06Jeff:1991, Gary Oldman, Tim Roth, Richard Dreyfuss is the player just chewing up the scenery. It was so fun to discover him in this. I was watching it having this moment of like, I wonder if this is ever in in-flight entertainment. And like, if I ever saw someone watching Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are dead on the Delta Studio, I would be like, I'm sorry, that's my new husband. And this is what we're doing. You can totally get the gist. Their delivery is loose and playful. Gary Oldman having a great time, as always. It was a real delight to spend two hours with that last night. I mean, I think also if you can ever see if it's ever at a local college or I don't know where you live or a high school like Rebecca's high school trying to put it on.

1:05:54I think even a amateur production would be super fun to go see. I would like to go see it. One of my great regrets in my literary and artistic life is when I was in New York, we didn't go see more live theater. It was expensive and hard. And we did some and every time I go see live theater, even when it's bad, I have a great time. There's just something special and there's something about it.

1:06:13Jeff:There is something magical about it. One of my long standing half baked ideas is that there maybe it's fully baked and I just need execution for it is that we should have some sort of like national or global resource for finding live productions. like I should be able to just go to some website like I can go to just watch and figure out where to stream any movie I want or any TV show I want and I want somewhere where I can go and just put in I want to see Rosencrantz and Guildenstern somewhere on stage in the next three months and that it could be within a thousand miles or 500 miles or something like that exactly are you willing to drive or are you willing to fly for it and that then you could find it because like outside of checking what's on Broadway or what's coming to the theaters in your local area Like I try to do this when I travel, look at like what's playing at local theaters and playhouses.

1:07:03Jeff:But there's not an easy way to just be like, if I wanted to just get a wild hair and go see Rosencrantz and Guildenstern next week, where could I do it? Yeah, I mean, Time Out magazine in New York, we used to use for things that were coming there. But if you wanted to say, I'm willing to drive to Boston, but I'm also willing to go see a community college production of something. Exactly. A college production of a lot of these things, again, they're not as good as Broadway. Could be really fun. It can be a lot of fun and way less expensive than 150 Bones to go see it on Broadway or a traveling Lion King at your local thing that you've seen twice already.

1:07:34So I love that idea, Rebecca. I love that idea quite a bit. Let's say we're going to make a new adaptation. Would you prefer a movie, musical, TV series or Muppets? It's been a while, Rebecca, but let's say it.

1:07:44Jeff:Muppets all day. Amazing. And like there are so many combinations of Muppets that this would be fun with. You could do Piggy and Kermit as Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. You could do the two. Gonzo and Fozzie. Oh, yeah. Animal. You could do the two cranky old guys that sit in the opera box. I can never remember their names. It would just be such a good time. And so it's been a while since we got to do a Muppet one because usually they're gross or sexual or violent. We found this is where we get one where there's a good candidate. The other conceit about the Muppet is there can be one human. I think the one human has to be Hamlet.

1:08:23Jeff:It does. And in the Hamlet episode, I was like, they're all Muppets and Adam Driver is Hamlet. And maybe that makes this even more absurd. Or Ethan Hawke, who has played Hamlet, is Hamlet. I'm never going to say no to an Ethan Hawke moment. That's a cheap shot for me. I think the standard version of this would be Kermit and Fozzie as Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, and then Gonzo as the player. Because he's a show person, right? Yes. Yeah. I love that. And then you could get Piggy to play Ophelia or Gertrude, you know, but I think that plays. I think that's an unbelievable idea. Muppets all day.

1:09:04I'd love to see it. I'd love to see it. Okay. Miscellaneous, this is where we put our other stuff. Trivia, adaptations, rumors, misretriever quotes, and etc. Rebecca, what else did you unearth that you'd like to relay to our dear listener? Yeah.

1:09:16Jeff:Okay. So when the play opens, they're flipping a coin and it has landed on heads 90 times in a row. And they are by turns like elated and freaked out about this and eventually just kind of despondent, like, oh, my God, it has to land on tails at some point. And so I'd put this one through chat GPT, that the probability of a coin landing on heads 90 times in a row is roughly one in 1.24 octillion. That means you could flip a coin once every second for the entire age of the universe, about 13.8 billion years, and still expect to see this happen less than one time. An amazing note. I didn't even think to look it up.

1:10:01What do you think that coin flip and this odds thing is about? What do you make of that? This is where we start, right? This is the who goes there of the ghost in Hamlet.

1:10:11Jeff:It's a great question. I think that it's a nod to those strange, unexplainable coincidences that happen that feel like they must mean something or that feel like they're impossible. and it's just they're possible, but they're not very probable. And sometimes things that are possible and not very probable happen to us. And does that mean everything or does it mean nothing? Yeah. Well, yeah, that our own existence, each of our individual existences is this improbable almost, right? When you think about if you start, if the first coin flip is the big bang, and then every subsequent atomic or molecular interactions, another coin flip, We are way less probable.

1:10:57Me sitting there in this shirt with no hair is way less probable than this. I think that's fascinating. I think the other thing that I'm thinking about, too, is it's still probable, right? It still could happen. Whereas what is described in this play cannot happen. fiction even exceeds the least probable thing that could happen and yet it has meaning even though it cannot happen fascinating we sound a little stoned which is also the vibe here this is that's what stone sober we're stark raving sane this is what we're doing here yes yes

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1:14:15Jeff:That's quince.com slash wellread for free shipping and 365 day returns. quince.com slash wellread. This episode is brought to you by Facebook. So you were scrolling on marketplace and there it was the bike you'd been searching for. You sent a message and it turned out the seller was super chatty, kind of funny and an avid cyclist. The next thing you know, you're in a cycling crew. Well, a community cycling group. The thing about Facebook, you might find more than what you're looking for. From a browse to a bike ride, this summer, find more on Facebook. The idea for Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead originally came from a literary agent named Kenneth Ewing.

1:15:02I love it. I didn't know this. This is a great find.

1:15:04Jeff:This was somewhere in my research. He suggested an exploration of what happened in England after Hamlet was banished from Elsinore Castle in Denmark. Who was the king who received Claudius' murderous missive from Hamlet's unsuspecting former college pals? And it just set Stoppard off and going. Just another couple little fun nuggets. Daniel Radcliffe played Rosencrantz in the 50th anniversary performance at the Old Vic. In 2017, I didn't recognize the name of the actor who played Guildenstern. And then in 2019, Stoppard wrote an opera called Penelope about the Odyssey told from Penelope's point of view.

1:15:41Jeff:So we can pull him back into our hot Greek summer discourse as well. Love it. The film version is the only movie Stoppard directed, which I don't know. Interesting. He was writing and making other stuff. I said it premiered at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival. Stoppard wrote the first draft on a five-month government arts grant, and it was in a castle writing this. So I have an all caps here, support the arts. Support the arts, yes. Support the arts. Time for hot takes, Rebecca. I would love another flipped POV version of this that focuses on the players. What town were they in before? What kinds of little spats did they get in with each other while they're roaming from town to town?

1:16:23Jeff:How are they deciding which of their death plays to put on? What happens if someone takes the player up on the offer to pay a little extra and get in on the action? Little bordello situation? Yeah. Yeah, like all of that stuff. Just it would be super fun. I love that. Yeah. What about you? It puts movies to shame. For what I mean, I like language is the juice for me, to quote uncut gems. Like the action is the juice for Adam Sandler in this, but like dialogue and ideas and language are the juice. And it's that we are struggling so hard to make a parallel. And even Stoppard's own screenplays for nonstopper things don't do what this does.

1:17:06Yeah. I'm not sure what else to say. I was thinking about Python, Monty Python. Great pick. Which started around the same time, 1969, as we got together. I couldn't find anything, you know, so it's a few years after this. So either it's simultaneous discovery, but like it feels like Stoppard kind of wrapped in the whole Python thing in one go and sort of moved on of like high, low, playful, silly, but it's also about something. and for people who like Python like I did, I still do, but when I thought of Python in high school, I was like, this is humor for smart people. I was like, oh, no, no, no, no, no.

1:17:45I mean, yes, but this is not the end all be all. It sort of runs through the possibilities of Python and then it transcends it and moves on to other things.

1:17:54Jeff:Yeah, Python's a gateway drug, I think, for this kind of smart humor, though. Right. Further reading, Rex for Read-Alikes, books inspired this one and more, Rebecca. We talked about waiting for Godot. That's obvious and easy. We will probably get to that at some point on this show. I'm sure we will. And it's really hard to find read-alikes for this or to think of things. For me, it was at least. Catch-22, Joseph Heller, I think a different spin on an absurd kind of story about what it all means. Maybe it doesn't mean anything, but it definitely means something. Sometimes it doesn't mean anything.

1:18:27The Hamlet figure is like military authority and intelligence, right? Like the bureaucracy. Oh, that's interesting.

1:18:33Jeff:And if you want just another spin on Hamlet, Fat Ham by James E. James is a play that won the Pulitzer a couple years ago. It re-spins Hamlet as a queer black man. And the version of it that I saw performed in D.C. was set at a family barbecue, like a backyard barbecue, and was just another great example of how much fun you can have adapting Shakespeare, playing with Shakespeare, building off of Shakespeare. Yeah. Other Cedarwell-Ride titles it connects to, Hamlet, obviously. I was thinking Oedipus the King, and for this regard, which is Oedipus and Rosencrantz and Guildenstern at some point have the realization that there's a grander design here that they do not have agency in.

1:19:23Like this mousetrap, you know, murder of Gonzago that didn't really need the mousetrap. The prophecy is sort of the mousetrap. And Hamlet himself at one point realizes there's something bigger. There's, you know, the line I come back to is there's special providence in the fall of a sparrow. He realizes there's something else going on here that he does not have access to, not just to understand, but even to engage with or affect in some way. And so there's a surrendering at some point to the greater thing. Reminds me a little bit of the Odyssey of the Nolan, like the thing that unlocks the return is surrendering, which is an interesting connection at the same time.

1:19:57That's not in the Odyssey poem. That's in the Odyssey movie at the same time. So the Oedipus of it is like there's a totality. And I think there's one thing a modern sort of story-driven consumer of culture is going to have a hard time with is like this is what the character should have done, right? A direct relationship between intention, agency, and outcome. That is not what's at stake here in Oedipus or this. And I think one of the, maybe my critiques of the Odyssey film is that it transposes that desire for Odysseus did this, it meant X, and then he did Y to get over it, and now we're at Z.

1:20:35Where that's not really... Too much of a straight line. That's too straight of a line. Again, Nolan's is an adaptation of the Odyssey. That's fine. But the Odyssey itself is a little bit more like, this is what happened, man. And you're going to have to take the meaning from it what you will, because it's not really about, well, morality or should have or something else.

1:20:52Jeff:I mean, I think even just like on a meta level, what just happened here where you went from Stoppard to Oedipus to the Odyssey and back is an example of the kind of like spinning that happens within the play. And it does make you want to like reach for other things. But Stoppard inspires these kinds of connections. I was thinking about Hitchhiker's Guide and Douglas Adams, you know, same generation-ish, definitely grew up listening to Monty Python, that smart, silly humor and the mixing of nonsense and high philosophy. A very different experience to read Hitchhiker's Guide than to read or to watch Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are dead, but they feel like cousins to me.

1:21:37Jeff:And we do have an episode, of course, on Hitchhiker's Guide. Yeah, I mean, Arthur Dent and Ford Prefect are secondary tertiary characters to the grand designs of the universe, right? The Vogon fleet coming to destroy them is a little bit of like the plot of Hamlet, right? Like there's nothing, they just have to get out of it and exist within it. And yeah, that's another one of those examples of taking the droids and following their story and following them into the wider universe. You had the best cocktail party crib sheets. I really struggled with this. It was hard. I don't think I can do it.

1:22:06Yeah.

1:22:08Jeff:So I've got two. When nothing means anything, everything is funny. And then to quote directly from the player, uncertainty is the normal state. You're nobody special.

1:22:22It's a real cold glass of water in the face.

1:22:24Jeff:We're just all down here trying to figure it out together, Jeff. Yeah. Final beat. This is our zero to well-read score. Each one gets a score from one to 10 with 10 being the highest. This is not a – you don't take one with a higher score or lower score and say it's better. It's just like how do you orient yourself into the wider world of writing and history and cultural memory here? Here are our five categories. I'll run through them quickly and then Rebecca and I will try to come to an agreement with what we think. The five categories are historical importance, readability, current relevance of central questions, book nerd, read cred, and oh damn factor.

1:22:56An interesting lineup for this particular – So historical importance, I guess this is the couching I would do, which is this is the play that launched a thousand accolades for Tom Stoppard. And if we take that at face value and then connect that to what we said about his centrality to theater over the last 60 years, pretty high. And yet not a lot of people, I don't know enough about theater saying this is where these are all the people that were influenced by Stoppard. Maybe he was an artistic dead end. I just don't know about that. So we're going to tread lightly here.

1:23:28Jeff:I think it's tough because Stoppard is more important than just Rosencrantz and Guildenstern is. Like, I would give him a higher historical importance score than I would give the play. Isn't that true for all the authors, though? That's true. I mean, maybe To Kill a Mockingbird is more important than Hard to Kill a Mockingbird. Yeah, I think if you've got a one-hit wonder situation, the book exceeds the writer. Maybe right down the middle then, like in the 5-6 zone for historical importance. Let's go 5.5. readability is also a difficult one too because it you can watch it and it will flow like Shakespeare like you will get through it you'll know what's happening you'll know what's happening but at times you will be scratching your head and not sure you got it which I think is feature not a bug but I don't know how to translate that into a readability score do you I do think that that feature not a bug makes readability it lowers a readability score because like you're just gonna can't be it can't be 9 10 i don't even think it be an 8 do you uncertainty is the normal state uh i think no i think probably like a six six or seven yeah i'm okay with that current relevance of central questions i mean they're not specific to our time but they are general to all time so is that a nine is that a 10 i don't know what to do with that it's pretty high watching the film and watching the guys like walk through the forest just philosophizing together, but then slipping back into silly bullshit.

1:24:52Jeff:I was like, I've been on this hike. You know, or like, you're just talking about nothing, and then all of a sudden you're talking about everything. So that feels really relevant. Seven? Oh, I'm going to go high. Eight, nine? Okay, let's go nine. What's art? That's true. Yeah, let's go nine. Yeah. I think the book nerd read credit is pretty good on this. Yeah, I think this is a nine or a ten, really high. I don't know that Ulysses is a 10. I don't think it's that. Okay, so, all right. Eight and a half, nine, something like that. O'Damn Factor, nine. Nine, yeah, it's high. Nine, easy for me. Good scores, Stoppers.

1:25:28Good scores, yeah. All right, that brings us to the end of our show today. You can go to patreon.com slash Zul2Lread for guided read-alongs and membership options that include access to bonus content. One of those pieces of bonus content will be us talking for 20, 25 minutes about our favorite notable Shakespeare adaptations. You can follow us on the socials at Zero to Well Read Podcast and whichever one you like. Shoot us an email, zerotowellreadatbookrad.com. We do not think about linear time here. So if you're listening to an early episode and you've got a take or an experience, we want to hear about your own reaction, relation, questions, and affirmations about the text and what we do here.

1:26:08Some of them will be candidates to get wrapped into the mailbag. Some of them will be just for our own edification. But we do check out all of those. thanks to Thrift Books for sponsoring this season of Zero to Wild. Buying plays is cool, Rebecca. Having plays on your shelf is cool.

1:26:21Jeff:It's nice. And then lastly, Zero to Wild Red is a proud member of the Airwave Podcast Network. Rebecca, thank you so much. Thanks, y 'all.